About

Jen is a thirty-year-old Canadian book blogger and bibliophile currently residing in the wilds of suburbia. Aside from a penchant for older men, particularly those with the surnames Firth, Elba and Norton, Jen is also passionately interested in running, Mad Men, and Marilyn Monroe. In addition to being a voracious reader and self-proclaimed television addict, Jen is also an aspiring children and youth services librarian who would like to pursue a MLIS and better help readers find the perfect book for them.

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Waiting On Wednesday is a regular feature on Pop! Goes The Reader in which I highlight forthcoming titles which I’m particularly excited about and looking forward to. This weekly event is hosted by Jill at Breaking The Spine.

Before I was a blog writer, I was a blog reader, and one of the posts I enjoyed most from my favourite bloggers were ones in which they discussed the books they were most looking forward to in the coming year. With their access to publisher catalogues and industry professionals, I was sure they knew something I didn’t, and I was always eager to find more books to add to my TBR. (It was a simpler time.) With that in mind, I thought it might be fun to resurrect my old Waiting On Wednesday feature and talk a little each week about a few upcoming releases I’m really excited about.

My three choices this week are definitely on a theme: Non-fiction. I tend to read in phases, becoming obsessed with one genre before eventually moving on to another. From Jeff Guinn’s The Road To Jonestown: Jim Jones and Peoples Temple to Carrie Fisher’s Wishful Drinking, non-fiction is a category I’ve already read quite a bit of in 2017, and I don’t see this ending any time soon. While eclectic, today’s books represent three of my biggest passions: Austen, food, and running. Best of all, two of the books – Give A Girl A Knife and The Long Run – are releasing this month, so I don’t have long to wait!

On the eve of the two hundredth anniversary of Jane Austen’s death, take a trip back to her world and the many places she lived as historian Lucy Worsley visits Austen’s childhood home, her schools, her holiday accommodations, the houses – both grand and small – of the relations upon whom she was dependent, and the home she shared with her mother and sister towards the end of her life. In places like Steventon Parsonage, Godmersham Park, Chawton House and a small rented house in Winchester, Worsley discovers a Jane Austen very different from the one who famously lived a ‘life without incident’. Worsley examines the rooms, spaces and possessions which mattered to her, and the varying ways in which homes are used in her novels as both places of pleasure and as prisons. She shows readers a passionate Jane Austen who fought for her freedom, a woman who had at least five marriage prospects, but – in the end – a woman who refused to settle for anything less than Mr. Darcy. Illustrated with two sections of color plates, Lucy Worsley’s Jane Austen at Home is a richly entertaining and illuminating new book about one of the world’s favorite novelists and one of the subjects she returned to over and over in her unforgettable novels: home.

A beautifully written food memoir chronicling one woman’s journey from her rural Midwestern hometown to the intoxicating world of New York City fine dining — and back again — in search of her culinary roots

Before Amy Thielen frantically plated rings of truffled potatoes in some of New York City’s finest kitchens — for chefs David Bouley, Daniel Boulud, and Jean-Georges Vongerichten — she grew up in a northern Minnesota town home to the nation’s largest French fry factory, the headwaters of the fast food nation, with a mother whose generous cooking dripped with tenderness, drama, and an overabundance of butter.

Inspired by her grandmother’s tales of cooking in the family farmhouse, Thielen moves north with her artist husband to a rustic, off-the-grid cabin deep in the woods. There, standing at the stove three times a day, she finds the seed of a growing food obsession that leads her to the sensory madhouse of New York’s top haute cuisine brigades. But, like a magnet, the foods of her youth draw her back home, where she comes face to face with her past and a curious truth: that beneath every foie gras sauce lies a rural foundation of potatoes and onions.

Amy Thielen’s coming-of-age story pulses with energy, a cook’s eye for intimate detail, and a dose of dry Midwestern humor. Give A Girl A Knife offers a fresh, vivid view into New York’s high-end restaurants before returning Thielen to her roots, where she realizes that the marrow running through her bones is not demi-glace but gravy—thick with nostalgia and hard to resist.

Title The Long Run: A Memoir Of Loss and Life In MotionAuthor Catriona Menzies-PikePages 256 PagesIntended Target Audience AdultGenre & Keywords Non-Fiction, Memoir, RunningTo Be Published May 23rd, 2017 by Crown Publishing Group (NY)Find It OnGoodreads ● Amazon.com ● Chapters ● The Book Depository

Thirty-year-old Catriona Menzies-Pike defined herself in many ways: voracious reader, pub crawler, feminist, backpacker, and, since her parents’ deaths a decade earlier, orphan. “Runner” was nowhere near the list. Yet when she began training for a half marathon on a whim, she found herself an instant convert. Soon she realized that running, “a pace suited to the precarious labor of memory,” was helping her to grieve the loss of her parents in ways that she had been, for ten messy years, running away from.

As Catriona excavates her own past, she also grows curious about other women drawn to running. What she finds is a history of repression and denial — running was thought to endanger childbearing, and as late as 1967 the organizer of the Boston Marathon tried to drag a woman off the course, telling her to “Get the hell out of my race” — but also of incredible courage and achievement. As she brings to life the stories of pioneering athletes and analyzes the figure of the woman runner in pop culture, literature, and myth, she comes to the heart of why she’s running, and why any of us do.

Now it’s YOUR turn! Which books are you most looking forward to? Do you enjoy reading non-fiction, too? If so, what are some of your favourite titles? Let me know in the comments – I would love to hear from you!